ACROSS THE RED SEA TO JOIN LAWRENCE AND FEISAL
Emir Feisal and Colonel Lawrence had got as far as Akaba with their
campaign when Mr. Chase and I arrived from the Palestine front with
our battery of cameras. It was by no means an easy matter even to
get to the Arab base-camp and our adventures in doing so may even
justify another digression from the story of Lawrence and his
associates, in order to better illustrate how remote this campaign
really was from the rest of the World War. Shortly after I had met
Lawrence in Jerusalem, while lunching with General Allenby and the
Duke of Connaught, the name of the archæologist turned soldier came
up during the conversation. Out of curiosity I asked the
commander-in-chief why the Arabian campaign and Lawrence’s exploits
had been kept such a secret. He replied that it had been considered
advisable to say as little as possible, because they hoped that
large numbers of the conscript Arabs fighting in the Turkish army
might desert and join Shereef Hussein in his fight for Arabian
independence. They were afraid lest the Arabs of Syria, Palestine,
and Mesopotamia whom the Turks had conscripted should get the
mistaken idea that the Allies were inspiring the Hedjaz revolt and
hence erroneously conclude that it was not a patriotic rebellion.
For this reason the Allies were anxious that the campaign should
appear in its true light as an independent Arabian movement. But
so successful had been Lawrence’s efforts that Allenby said it was
no longer quite so necessary to maintain such strict secrecy,
adding that if I happened to be interested in what was going on in
Arabia he would be glad to have me join King Hussein’s army, and
afterward tell the world a little of what the Arabs had done toward
helping to win the Great War.
This was exactly what I had often thought of asking permission to
do; but I had been warned that because of the secrecy with which
the campaign was being conducted there was not the slightest chance
of receiving the commander-in-chief’s consent. I of course lost no
time in accepting and jumped at this opportunity of going on what
I was sure would be an adventure of a lifetime.
We were told that it would be practically impossible to make the
journey overland from Palestine to Arabia, or at any rate that it
could only be done by going through the Turkish lines in disguise.
We had neither the time nor the inclination nor the necessary
knowledge of the country and the language to attempt this; so,
accompanied by Mr. Chase, my artist colleague, I returned to Egypt
to consult the heads of the Arab Bureau in Cairo. There we were
told:
“You can get as far as Akaba in a cargo boat, but next to Timbuctoo
it is the most out-of-the-way place in the world. You will find no
hotel porters at the dock to receive you, and you will have to be
content with a block of coral for your pillow and a date-palm for
your shelter.”
In pre-war days a tramp wind-jammer returning from Borneo or the
Solomon Islands with a cargo of copra would occasionally lose its
way in a storm and drive up the Gulf of Akaba, but apart from rare
occasions like that almost no one had visited the place for a
thousand years.
“You will get nothing to eat but unleavened bread, dates, and
perhaps a few fried locusts,” remarked one general, on whose advice
we bought many little luxuries, including fifty bars of milk
chocolate. A colonel cheerfully warned me, “If you value your
lives, take plenty of cigarettes for the Bedos.” So we filled every
crevice of our outfit with “gaspers,” which proved worth their
weight in sovereigns. On the day we landed in Arabia the thermometer
happened to register above the melting-point of chocolate, and when
I opened my kit-bag I found a semi-fluid mass of bullets, matches,
cigarettes, pencils, note-books, and chocolate.
On our way to Arabia we followed a roundabout route, sailing
fifteen hundred miles up the Nile into the heart of Africa to
Khartum, and then across the Nubian Desert for five hundred miles
to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where we hoped to get accommodation
on a tramp vessel of some sort.
Our first stop up the Nile was at Luxor, where we were given a
welcome that had not been equaled since “Teddy” Roosevelt stopped
there on his way back from hunting big game in East Africa. A swarm
of haggard guides, who had been waiting four long years in vain
for American tourists, mobbed us from sheer joy. Our welcome
resembled a battle royal, and the runners from the Luxor Hotel
eventually succeeded in dragging us into their ramshackle gharry,
and off we careened through streets lined with deserted tourists’
shops, with the rest of the crowd howling and gyrating behind us
like dancing dervishes.
Our visit to Hundred-gated Thebes, the Temple of Karnak, and the
Tombs of the Kings the following day was rather spoiled by a
pitiful tale that our guide poured into our ears.
“American tourist he no come no more. All we guides starve. Oh,
woe! Oh, woe!” wailed this melancholy old Arab. “Me guide here
thirty-five years, and so help me Allah, the only real tourist in
the world is you Americans. The Inglisse [English], German, and
French spend all their time counting their centimes. If American
see something he want he say, ‘How much?’ You tell him and, praise
be to Allah, no matter what price is, he say, ‘All right, wrap ’er
up!’ All us best guides specialize on Americans. Before the war me
no more bother guiding anybody but American than you bother to
shoot baby elephant if you see big one. Why President Wilson no
stop the war; and why,” he added in a pleading voice, “you Americans
send money and food to Armenians and nothing to us poor starving
guides of Egypt?”
Photograph: SHORE-LINE AT THE HEAD OF THE GULF OF AKABA
Photograph: SUNSET OVER THE FORT AT AKABA
On the first evening after our arrival in Khartum we were dining
with the chief of the Central African Intelligence Department at
the House of the Hippopotamus Head when suddenly I noticed his face
turn pale. Glancing at the sky to the east I saw the reason. Coming
straight toward Khartum was a great black wall that looked like a
range of mountains moving down upon us. It was the dread _huboob,_
a terrific African sand-storm. The dinner party broke off abruptly,
and the other guests raced for their homes. Jumping on a donkey
which was awaiting me in the outer court, I made a dash for the
Charles Gordon Hotel, half a mile away.
It was a glorious moonlight night with stars twinkling radiantly
all around to the north, west, and south, but straight ahead to
the east I could see that mountain wall of sand churning toward
me. It looked as though the crack o’ doom were approaching. Soon
it was only a few hundred yards away, and then it broke over us.
Flying sand stung my face like needles and blinded me. Leaning
forward over the neck of my diminutive mount, I tried to offer as
little resistance to the storm as possible, but it was all we could
do to fight our way against that whirling mass of sand and reach
the hotel.
The heat indoors was so unbearable that every one tried sleeping
with his windows open, and the sand threatened to bury us, beds
and all. When I closed the windows the atmosphere was stifling,
and the sand still swept in sheets through the crevices. The storm
raged for hours. There was not a house in Khartum that the sand
did not penetrate. I have been through cyclones, cloud-bursts,
arctic blizzards, fierce gales in the Southern Ocean, monsoons,
typhoons, and Sumatras; but none of them could hold a candle to
that _huboob_. In Alaska when a newcomer, or _cheechacko_, remains
in the Far North through the long dark winter he becomes a
“sourdough” and is admitted to the fraternity of Arctic Pioneers.
In the Sudan there is a similar saying that he who survives a
_huboob_ forthwith becomes a pucka African. But seventy below in
the Yukon is preferable to one hundred above in a Sudan _huboob!_
One afternoon a representative from the British Intelligence Office
took me a few miles distant from Khartum to call on “the holiest
man in the Sudan.” So rich had the natives grown from the war that
they were refusing to sell their grain supplies, which were badly
needed by the armies in Palestine and Arabia. I had expressed a
desire to meet this holy man, and it occurred to the authorities
that a visit from a foreigner might flatter him and put him in a
sufficiently pleasant frame of mind to enable them to wheedle him
into selling his store of grain, which would cause the other
natives to follow suit.
We set out in the governor’s gharry, a picturesque victoria drawn
by high-spirited white horses. Our driver was a wild-eyed
fuzzy-wuzzy with a mop of crinkly hair full of mutton fat, with
long wooden skewers sticking out at all angles. Off we galloped
across the desert to the village of Berri, where we found Shereef
Yusef el Hindi, the holy man, awaiting us at the gate of his
mud-brick palace. The shereef, a tall, thin-faced,
distinguished-looking Arab with hypnotic eyes, garbed in sandals,
a robe of green and white silk, and green turban, ushered us into
his garden, where we were invited to review the most bewildering
array of drinks that I had ever seen. There were concoctions of
everything from pomegranate-juice to sloe gin and from rose-water
to a horse’s neck. They were of every shade from mauve to taupe.
They were served in every sort of container from cut-glass tumblers
to silver goblets. Fortunately, custom only required us to take a
sip of each; otherwise the result would have been catastrophic for
many were of subtle potency.
I remember that afternoon call as a series of surprises, of which
the first was the beauty of the garden inside the ugly adobe outer
walls of the shereef’s palace. The second was the variety of fluid
refreshment placed before us. Surely Shereef Yusef el Hindi must
have one of the genii from “The Arabian Nights” mixing drinks in
his palace. Even in pre-prohibition days, when assigned to cover
a national college fraternity convention, never was I invited to
pass through such an ordeal by drink as I faced at Shereef Yusef
el Hindi’s oasis. The third surprise came when I saw the attractive
interior of his palace as we passed through on our way to a Moorish
balcony near the roof, where we were confronted with another relay
of drinks. But the climax came when I discovered that my host
instead of being an African witch-doctor was a savant of wide
learning. His library even contained Arabic translations of the
speeches of Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Theodore Roosevelt,
and Woodrow Wilson. In fact I found that this Sudanese holy man
knew more about the history of my own country than I did!
We discussed religion, and I was impressed by his spirit of
tolerance. “I believe, as do all Moslems who deserve to be called
educated,” said he, “that the fundamental principles underlying
the world’s greatest religions—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism,
and Mohammedanism—are the same; that there is but one God and that
he is supreme; that we should be tolerant of the opinions of
others; that all men should live together as brothers and do unto
others as we would have others do unto us.”
It was not difficult to understand why Shereef Yusef el Hindi was
looked upon as a holy man by his ignorant, half-civilized
fellow-countrymen. His princely manners, his dignity and poise,
his musical bell-like voice, his large, lustrous, hypnotic brown
eyes, and his wisdom would have won him distinction in any country.
He is not an Ethiopian but is a descendant of the Arabian tribe of
Koreish to which Mohammed belonged.
Being a holy man in the Sudan is a lucrative profession. Shereef
Yusef el Hindi spends most of his time naming babies. When a child
is born the father comes running to him, prostrates himself at the
shereef’s feet, and says, “O noble one, what name shall I bestow
upon my child?”
Whereupon the holy man replies: “O faithful one, arise! Go thy way
and return again upon the morrow.”
Then, when the father returns the next day, the shereef intones:
“Allah be praised. In a vision last night the Prophet appeared and
revealed to me that your faith should be rewarded and your child
blessed with the name of his own daughter, Fatima. Five dollars,
please!”
From Khartum we crossed the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan on the Red
Sea. Here, as we had hoped, we found a tramp steamer bound for the
Arabian coast. She was a much torpedoed cargo-boat which had been
transferred from the British Indian coastal service to the
Mediterranean, where during the first years of the war she had
survived several harrowing years serving as a target for the
kaiser’s U-boats. On board with us were 226 Sudanese sheep, 150
horses and mules from America and Australia, sixty-seven donkeys
from Abyssinia, ninety-eight deserters from the Turkish army,
eighty-two Egyptian fellaheen laborers, thirty-four Gordon
Highlanders, six British officers, and two obsolete aëroplanes.
Our crew consisted of Hindus, Javanese, Somalis, Berberines, and
fuzzy-wuzzies. The skipper of this modern ark was a rotund, jovial
Scotch-Irishman by the name of Rose. I doubt whether Captain Kidd
in the palmiest days of Caribbean piracy ever put to sea with such
a motley cargo and crew.
The different nationalities on board segregated themselves into
little racial colonies and did their own cooking in various parts
of the main deck. It would be impossible to imagine what the good
ship _Ozarda_ looked like after we had been at sea for a few
days—and what she smelled like! Some of the Sudanese were from the
Nubian Desert, where it is difficult enough to get water for
drinking purposes, to say nothing of water for bathing; some of
them had never had a real bath in their lives. But there was one
of them whom the Highlanders nicknamed Bathing Bert. This man
insisted on having his tub out of a bucket five times each day.
The Egyptian laborers entertained us incessantly with their
fantastic ceremonial dances. There was not room enough for all of
them to dance at a time, and so they went at it in relays. Some of
them danced until they collapsed on the deck from exhaustion.
Fainting, to them, was merely a sign that their spirits had been
transported to heaven for a few minutes’ sojourn with the Almighty.
There was no passenger accommodation, so that we had to sleep out
on the deck with the donkeys and mules. I bunked beside a
mouse-colored mule from Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain.
She was very pessimistic. She seemed to be worrying about something
back home and didn’t sleep well. Neither did I! Mark Twain would
have lost his sense of humor if he had been in my place.
We had a British officer on board who was bound for the Persian
Gulf. He was laboring under the erroneous impression that he had
fallen heir to the mantle of George Robey or Harry Lauder. He used
to tell a story until we were almost bored to extinction. I am
going to repeat one of his tales, not because I think it is funny
but because I know it is not funny! I want to show you the sort of
thing we had to endure. He said that he was out hunting lions once
in Central Africa; none of us doubted that for he had knocked about
all over the world from Kamchatka to the Kameruns. He said that
one day a lion jumped at him out of the bush but that he ducked
just in time, causing the lion to go right over his head. Some
minutes passed, and as the lion failed to return he crawled along
on his stomach to reconnoiter. Coming to an open space he peered
cautiously through the tall grass, and there he saw that same
lion—practising low jumps! One day we hit upon the idea of giving
cigarettes to the Turkish deserters, who could understand only a
few words of English, in order to get them to listen to his stories.
They would laugh when he laughed, and it satisfied him and certainly
relieved the rest of us.
When we finally arrived at the ancient and long deserted seaport
of King Solomon at the head of the Gulf of Akaba, our ark anchored
half a mile offshore. We eventually pushed off, bound for the
distant fringe of palm-trees at the base of King Solomon’s Mountains
on board a lighter loaded down with donkeys and mules. One unlucky
donkey was kicked overboard by a nervous mule. Immediately two
sharks appeared and attacked him fore and aft. One seized a front
leg and the other the poor donkey’s rump, and literally they pulled
him in two. We were told by the skipper of our ark that there are
more sharks in the Red Sea than in any other waters of the globe.
When we grounded on the coral beach we were greeted by several
thousand Bedouins, who welcomed us by blazing into the air with
their rifles and pistols. This firing had begun when we were still
afar off, and Mr. Chase and I thought we were arriving in the midst
of a battle. So fantastic and full of color was that palm-fringed
coral shore, and so picturesque were the Bedouins with their
flowing beards, their gorgeous robes, their strange head-dress,
and their array of ancient and modern weapons of every sort, that
it all seemed like some bizarre Oriental pageant. So indeed it was,
and these were some of Colonel Lawrence’s modern Arabian knights.
King Solomon’s long-forgotten port had been turned into a great
base-camp, and enormous piles of supplies lay stacked in the sand
and under the palms. Several of the British officers who were in
charge of the receiving of supplies at Akaba took us to a near-by
tent and slaked our growing thirst, and a few hours later Lawrence
himself came down the Wadi Ithm, returning from one of his
mysterious expeditions into the blue.
With Lawrence, no two days in the desert were ever the same, so
that it would be impossible to describe a typical one. But the camp
routine at the headquarters of the Arabian army, when no _ghazu_
(raid) was in progress, followed some such program as this: At 5
a. m., as the first rays of dawn fell on the jagged peaks
of Sinai, the army imam would climb the highest sand-dune and give
the morning call to prayer. He was a chap with such astonishing
vocal powers that his nasal chant woke every man and animal in
Akaba. Immediately after he had finished calling the Arabian
proletariat, Emir Feisal’s private imam would softly intone the
morning call at the door of his tent: “Praise be to Allah who makes
day succeed the night!”
Miss Gertrude Bell, the famous Syrian traveler, who, although a
woman, served on the Intelligence Staff in the Near East during
the war, has written a vivid description of the glorious intoxication
of a desert morning: “To wake in the desert dawn is like waking in
the heart of an opal. To my mind the saying about the Bay of Naples
should run differently. See the desert on a fine morning and die—if
you can.” Surely a fascinating book of adventure and romance could
be written about the war-time experience of Miss Bell in the
Mesopotamian Desert. As a staff officer she did everything required
of any man but wear a spine-pad and shorts.
A few minutes after the call to prayer had aroused the camp, a cup
of sweetened coffee would turn up, brought in by one of Feisal’s
slaves. The emir had five young Abyssinian blacks; slaves who were
the acme of fidelity, because the emir did not treat them as
slaves, nor regard them as such. Whenever one of them desired
money, Feisal ordered him to help himself to whatever he needed
from his bag of gold. No matter what was taken, he never complained,
and as a result, the thought of robbing never seemed to occur to
them.
At 6 a. m. Lawrence was in the habit of breakfasting with
Feisal in the emir’s tent, squatting Bedouin fashion on an old
Baluchi prayer-rug. Breakfast on lucky days included a many-layered
pastry of richly spiced puffed bread called Mecca cakes, and cooked
durra, a small round white seed—rather nasty stuff. Then, of
course, there were the inevitable dates. After breakfast little
glasses of sweetened tea were produced. From then until 8 a. m.
Lawrence would discuss the possible events of the day
either with the British officers or with some of the more prominent
Arab leaders. At that time Feisal worked with his secretary or
talked over private affairs in his tent with Lawrence. At 8 a. m.
Feisal would hold court and grant audiences in the Diwan
tent. According to the regular procedure, it was customary for the
emir to sit at the end of a great rug on a dais. Callers or
petitioners sat in front of the tent in a half-circle until they
were called up. All questions were settled summarily, and nothing
was left over.
One morning I was in the tent with Lawrence when a young Bedouin
was hauled in charged with having the evil eye. Feisal was not
present. Lawrence ordered the offender to sit at the opposite side
of the tent and look at him. Then for ten minutes he regarded him
with steady gaze, his steel-blue eyes seeming to bore a hole into
the culprit’s very soul. At the end of the ten minutes, Lawrence
dismissed the Bedouin. The evil spell had been driven off! By the
grace of Allah.
Another day a member of Lawrence’s body-guard came to him with the
complaint that one of his companions possessed the evil eye. Said
he, “O sea of justice, yonder fellow looked at my camel, and
straightway it went lame.” Lawrence settled this difficulty by
putting the man charged with the evil eye on the lame camel and
giving the defendant’s camel to the man who brought up the charge.
Blue eyes terrify the average Arab. Lawrence possesses two that
are bluer than the waters of the Mediterranean, and so the Bedouins
decided there was something superhuman about him. They themselves
nearly all have eyes like black velvet.
Whenever Feisal was present, Lawrence would step aside and decline
to decide disputes. He had no ambition to become the ruler of
Arabia himself, and he knew that it would be far better for the
future of the Arabs and for Emir Feisal if their differences were
handled in the usual way by one of their own people. In fact,
Lawrence never did anything himself that he could delegate to an
Arab who was capable of handling it successfully.
Usually at 11:30 a. m. Feisal arose and walked back to
his living-tent, where a little lunch would be served. Lawrence,
in the meantime, would spend half an hour or so reading the
inevitable Aristophanes or a favorite English poet. He carried
three books all through the campaign: “The Oxford Book of English
Verse,” Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” and Aristophanes, which shows
his catholic taste.
Lunch usually consisted of dishes such as stewed thorn-buds,
lentils, unleavened bread cooked in the sand, and rice or honey
cakes. I ate with a spoon, although the Arabs used their fingers,
as did Lawrence. After lunch there followed a short relay of
general talk, rounding out the conversation of the luncheon hour,
and, in the meantime, black bitter coffee and sweetened tea would
be served. In drinking tea and coffee the tribesmen would make as
much noise as possible. It is the polite way of indicating that
you are enjoying your drink. The emir would then dictate letters
to an Arab scribe or enjoy a siesta, while Lawrence, absorbed in
Wordsworth or Shelley, squatted on a prayer-rug in his own tent.
If there were afternoon cases to be disposed of, Shereef Lawrence
or Shereef Feisal would again hold court in the reception-tent.
From 5 until 6 p. m. Feisal would usually grant private
audiences, and at such times Lawrence sat with him, since the
discussion nearly always would have to do with the night’s
reconnaissance and future military operations.
Meanwhile, behind the servants’ tent a fire would be started with
a pile of thorns. Another sheep’s throat would be cut, in the name
of Allah the Merciful and Compassionate, and put on to roast. At
6 p. m. would come the evening meal, much like lunch
but with large fragments of mutton crowning the rice-heap, after
which would follow intermittent cups of tea until bedtime, which
for Lawrence was never any fixed hour. At night Lawrence would have
many of his most important consultations with the Arab leaders,
but occasionally Feisal would entertain his intimate associates
with stories of his adventures in Syria and Turkey, during the
eighteen years when his family lived at the Sublime Porte under
the wary eye of the Red Sultan.
The rest of us would often read well into the night. Before leaving
Egypt I had picked up second-hand copies of the records of a few
great Arabian travelers, such as Burkhardt, Burton, and Doughty.
With the exception of Doughty’s monumental masterpieces I found
none of the books in my haphazard collection more fascinating than
Miss Bell’s “The Desert and the Sown.” My interest in it was
stimulated by the stories which Colonel Lawrence related to me of
the war-time adventures of the brilliant authoress. This
extraordinary Englishwoman had been wandering about remote corners
of the Near East for a number of years prior to the war. She was
a scholar and a scientist, not an idle traveler in quest of
notoriety. With a lone Arab companion or two she had trekked for
hundreds of miles along the fringe of the Great Arabian Desert,
visiting the wild tribes and studying their language and customs.
So vast was her knowledge that the heads of the British Intelligence
Department in Mesopotamia asked her to accept a staff appointment,
and she played no small part in winning the friendship of some of
the most bloodthirsty tribesmen residing in the Tigris and Euphrates
Valleys. In her book, “The Desert and the Sown,” Miss Bell throws
much interesting light on the life of the desert-dwellers:
The fortunes of the Arab are as varied as those of a gambler
on the stock exchange. One day he is the richest man in
the desert, and the next morning he may not have a single
camel foal to his name. He lives in a state of war, and
even if the surest pledges have been exchanged with the
neighbouring tribes there is no certainty that a band of
raiders from hundreds of miles away will not descend on
his camp in the night, as a tribe unknown to Syria, the
Beni Awajeh, fell, two years ago, on the lands south-east
of Aleppo, crossing three hundred miles of desert, Marduf
(two on a camel) from their seat above Bagdad, carrying
off all the cattle and killing scores of people. How many
thousand years this state of things has lasted, those who
shall read the earliest records of the inner desert will tell
us, for it goes back to the first of them, but in all the
centuries the Arab has bought no wisdom from experience.
He is never safe, and yet he behaves as though security were
his daily bread. He pitches his feeble little camps, ten or
fifteen tents together, over a wide stretch of undefended and
indefensible country. He is too far from his fellows to
call in their aid, too far as a rule to gather the horsemen
together and follow after the raiders whose retreat must be
sufficiently slow, burdened with the captured flocks, to
guarantee success to a swift pursuit. Having lost all his
worldly goods, he goes about the desert and makes his
plaint, and one man gives him a strip or two of goats’ hair
cloth, and another a coffee-pot, a third presents him with a
camel, and a fourth with a few sheep, till he has a roof to
cover him and enough animals to keep his family from
hunger. There are good customs among the Arabs, as
Namrud said. So he bides his time for months, perhaps
for years, until at length opportunity ripens, and the horsemen
of his tribe with their allies ride forth and recapture all
the flocks that had been carried off and more besides, and
the feud enters another phase. The truth is, that the
ghazu (raid) is the only industry the desert knows and the
only game. As an industry it seems to the commercial
mind to be based on a false conception of the laws of supply
and demand, but as a game there is much to be said for it.
The spirit of adventure finds full scope in it—you can
picture the excitement of the night ride across the plain,
the rush of the mares in the attack, the glorious popping
of rifles and the exhilaration of knowing yourself a fine
fellow as you turn homewards with the spoil. It is the best
sort of fantasia, as they say in the desert, with a spice of
danger behind it. Not that the danger is alarmingly great:
a considerable amount of amusement can be got without
much bloodshed, and the raiding Arab is seldom bent on
killing. He never lifts his hand against women and children,
and if here and there a man falls it is almost by
accident, since who can be sure of the ultimate destination
of a rifle bullet once it is embarked on its lawless course?
This is the Arab view of the ghazu.